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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a